Hackers always take time off. There is always one way to notice a true Hacker. At a party, the true Hacker is the one in the corner talking about operating system security and how to get around it. At the beach, the True Hacker is the one drawing flow charts in the sand. At a football game, the true Hacker is the one comparing the football plays against a simulation printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper.

Most Hackers work for the U.S. Government– mainly the Department of Defense. You can see the best Hackers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

What sort of environment does a Hacker function best in? No, not a heated room with a clean table and disks organized neatly, but they do best in rooms that have line-printed Snoopy calendars from the year 1969. They do not know how to cook, so they survive on Twinkies and coffee. Instead of wasting electricity for a heater, they spend it on air-conditioners to cool of their computer system in mid-January when the temperatures are below freezing. They wear layers and layers of clothing to keep the body heat in. When you see one of these people, instead of a Hacker coming into your mind, you think that he is about to go on a Polar expedition somewhere in the North Pole.

Hackers also like to hang around arcades. (This is also true for kids, little old ladies, and fighter pilots.) There, secluded in their

own environment, Hackers can talk freely on computer hints and short cuts while playing Pac-Man, or Joust.

All Hackers like Graphics. They like low-resolution, but prefer high-resolution the best. These graphics, such as Sine waves, rotating 3-D boxes, and little balloons, are confined to the limits of a systems capability. The older more experienced Hackers are the ones who are lucky enough to get to work on a VAX system, and maybe even a CRAY-1 SuperComputer. If they use these, they have only the limits of their imagination to stop them.

Most Middle School Hackers between the ages of 10 through 14, like to use computers to do reports on, and play games. Some of these younger generation Hackers have gotten into BASIC programming.

Some people, like to impress real Hackers by making them think that they know everything. There is a name for this kind of person. He is a Sub-Hacker (Intillectuous dumbfoundeth). For instance, you come up to them one day, and say,”Hey so-and-so what does BASIC stand for?” and you could sit there for days, and he would act like the answer was on the tip of his tongue, when it was probably in his toes. It is people like this that give Hackers a bad name.

All Hackers have rules that they go by. One is to never call long distance on Monday, because of the high phone charge. If builders built buildings they way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that comes along would destroy civilization. Another is, if the computer accepts a program on the first run without any errors, either there is a malfunction, or it must be a dream.

Hackers are a unique breed. Combining intelligence, personality, and a morale sense of good taste. A Hacker enjoys the environment that appeals to him the most. Such as, the computer room, the arcade, science lab, or the Atari downstairs. They like to be alone. Secluded in their own thoughts, thinking of what the password could be to log on to General Electric. Hackers are the people who are going to make our future brighter, and more exciting in the field of electronics, data processing, artificial intelligence, and programming. We need to support these people in all the ways that we can, so we will be insured of a more happier future in the world of technological advancements.

1. Thou shalt run lint frequently and study its pronouncements with care, for verily its perception and judgement oft exceed thine.

2. Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.

3. Thou shalt cast all function arguments to the expected type if they are not of that type already, even when thou art convinced that this is unnecessary, lest they take cruel vengeance upon thee when thou least expect it.

4. If thy header files fail to declare the return types of thy library functions, thou shalt declare them thyself with the most meticulous care, lest grievous harm befall thy program.

5. Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest “foo” someone someday shall type “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.

6. If a function be advertised to return an error code in the event of difficulties, thou shalt check for that code, yea, even though the checks triple the size of thy code and produce aches in thy typing fingers, for if thou thinkest “it cannot happen to me”, the gods shall surely punish thee for thy arrogance.

7. Thou shalt study thy libraries and strive not to re-invent them without cause, that thy code may be short and readable and thy days pleasant and productive.

8. Thou shalt make thy program’s purpose and structure clear to thy fellow man by using the One True Brace Style, even if thou likest it not, for thy creativity is better used in solving problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to understanding.

9. Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first six characters, though this harsh discipline be irksome and the years of its necessity stretch before thee seemingly without end, lest thou tear thy hair out and go mad on that fateful day when thou desirest to make thy program run on an old system.

10. Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that “All the world’s a VAX”, and have no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long even though the days of thy current machine be short.

ADA: A Dumb Arrangement
ADA: A Dumb Acronym
ADA: A Dumb Annoyance

BASIC: Boring And Shamelessly Idiotic Coders
BASIC: Badly Assembled, Severely Illogical Code
BASIC: Beginner’s Algorithms for Seemingly Infinite Confusion

C: Crud
C: Confusing

COBOL: Completly Outdated, Badly Overused Language
COBOL: Completly Overused, Badly Outdated Language
COBOL: Cowards Only Buy Outdated Languages
COBOL: Cowards Only Build Outdated Languages
COBOL: Crap Operated By Obsessed lunatics
COBOL: Crap Often Bothers Our Lethargy
COBOL: Crap Ostracized By Our Loathing
COBOL: Compiles Only Because Of Luck
COBOL: Cumbersome, Overdone, Badly Organized Language
COBOL: Coded Only By Obsessed Lunatics

FORTRAN: Files Only Run Through Right At Never-neverland

LISP: Lots of Insanely Stupid Parentheses
LISP: Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses

PASCAL: Programmers Against Structured Code And Language

Which language is right for you?

Assembler: You shoot yourself in the foot.

Ada: The Department of Defense shoots you in the foot after offering you a blindfold and a last cigarrette.

BASIC (interpreted): You shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol until your leg is waterlogged and rots off.

BASIC (compiled): You shoot yourself in the foot with a BB using a SCUD missile launcher.

C++: You create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Not knowing which feet are virtual, medical care is impossible.

COBOL: USE HANDGUN.COLT(45), AIM AT LEG.FOOT, THEN WITH ARM.HAND.FINGER ON HANDGUN.COLT(TRIGGER) PREFORM SQUEEZE, RETURN HANDGUN.COLT TO HIP.HOLSTER.

cah: After searching the manual until your foot falls asleep, you shoot the computer and switch to C.

dBASE: You buy a gun. Bullets are only available from another company and are promised to work so you buy them. Then you find out that the next version of the gun is the one that is scheduled to shoot bullets.

Fortran: You shoot yourself in each toe, interactively, until you run out of toes. You shoot the sixth bullet anyway, since no exception-processing was anticipated.

Modula-2: You perform a shooting on what might currently be a foot with what might currently be a bullet shot by what might currently be a gun.

Pascal: Same as Modula-2, except the bullet is not of the right type for the gun and your hand is blown off.

PL/1: After consuming all system resources, including bullets, the data processing department doubles its size, acquires two new mainframes, and drops the original on your foot.

Smalltalk, Actor, etc: After playing with the graphics for three weeks, the programming manager shoots you in the head.

Snobol: Grab your foot with your hand and rewrite your hand to be a bullet.